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Introduction

The essay examines the role of Hollywood that quintessential creator of social dreams, in producing cinematic images of social reality. The world Hollywood depicts is shaped by the glamorous slipstreams of stars and adventures, making up the drama, joy, pain, and capricious rhythms of everyday life.

Is Hollywood, which has been the entertainment site of major technological breakthroughs in twentieth century filmmaking, an instrument by means of which shadowy political/economic elites manipulate our vision of the real world we live in? And given the huge business inputs in the entertainment business, can Hollywood exercise artistic freedom without a moral/political squint?

There’s no Business Like Show Business

Filmmakers have emerged as some of our most influential populist historians. The film, JFK, for example, presented a conspiracy theory of the assassination of John F Kennedy in which the director Oliver Stone admittedly took dramatic license with known facts for the sake of the coherence of his plot. The presidential murder, according to Stone, was much like coup de’tat. Driven by deeply felt beliefs, Stone appears to have deftly manipulated unwieldy facts into a seamless conspiracy theory that resulted in an admittedly exciting, but unreliable film.

We need to remind ourselves that the techniques of the theater and cinema have seeped into politics, religion, education, warfare, crime, and commerce (Adorno 2002). Real life “stars” not only enable us to identify with images on the screen or TV, but we may see ourselves as the main characters and imagine how an audience would react to each event in the movie of our life (Gabler 1998). Such fantasy-building, according to Gabler, is the power and inventiveness of celebrity culture that also happens to be integral to the very popular action/hero Bond and Bourne films. With Bond and Bourne we too can generate, unconsciously perhaps, interior personal screen plays molded on the production values of Hollywood, television, and commercial agencies whose technologies are as sophisticated as any film and TV entertainment corporations.

In American society and other developed nations, the film industry and rock music fields have been the cradles that give birth to celebrities. The high technologies in the culture have not so much nullified or displaced institutions like religion, but have transformed and modified them. The adulation of John Wayne, Marilyn Monroe, Michael Jackson, Judy Garland, Elvis, the Beatles, Madonna, and so on, seems like a return to Roman/Greek polytheistic cultures with many divine figures and household gods. Billy Graham, Rev. Joel Osteen, Pope John Paul II, and a host of lesser personality types fill TV screens; their popularity serves as testimony to the influence of film/TV technologies.

Film and its related technologies, TV, radio, and musical recordings, tend to define what it means, and how we identify our place in society. The camera, the microphone, the TV set, and cell phone have had profound impact on our culture. At its core, one could say that the cult of celebrity—of which the Bond/Bourne films are good examples—represent the denial of death and offers an illusion of immortality (Hedges 2009). And they do more.

In Hollywood, the Lourdes of celebrity mania, there is a cemetery in Los Angeles—the Hollywood Forever Cemetery—, which is advertised as the final resting place for the stars. During World War II the English novelist, Evelyn Waugh, worked in the film studios and learned about the extravagant burial rituals and sites of film luminaries. His novel, The Loved One, is a biting, satire about the eccentricities of the stars and their need for immortality (Waugh 1947).

An essay by anthropologist Horace Miner about a mysterious group of people initially puzzled his students until they were told, or discovered, that the “Nacirema” were actually “Americans [“America” spelled backwards]. The fascinating aspect of this essay has to do with its accurate descriptions of American customs, cultural values and folkways, in essence, everyday life seen through the scientific lens of social ethnography. Miner described, for instance, even the practices of dentistry and the behavior of medical personnel in hospitals (Miner 1956). Similarly, in celebrity culture we have our talisman, our gods, divinities, and sacred sites: Graceland (Elvis), Never Land (Michael Jackson), the Isle of Serenity (Princess Diana), and The Eternal Flame (JFK). Auctions in prominent art houses voluntarily offer wealthy clients an opportunity to own relics of a celebrity in the hope, perhaps, of a magical transference of celebrity power. For example, Andy Warhol’s $40 swatch watches sell for thousands; even while living destitute, stars sell off their talismans: Elmelda Marcos sold her high heel shoes; Cher her 200 LasVegas Stage outfits; Liberace his fur coats and rugs. These items are cherished like relics among ancestor cults in Asia and Africa. In the modern Catholic Church, pilgrims travel to Fatima, Lourdes, and now Graceland which receives nearly one million visitors a year; and when celebrity items are not made available, they are stolen: Jim Morrison (The Doors rock group), James Dean (actor), and Buddy Holly (rock musician) have had their gravestones uprooted and carted away by worshipful, distraught fans. Is it farfetched to suppose that the type of celebrity bred in the Hollywood dream factories is not much different from other forms of adoration that are emotionally akin to some politically incandescent ideologies such as Nazism and Communism whose doctrines and charismatic representatives have attracted elements of the intelligentsia?

In 1953, Milosz published The Captive Mind which addressed kindred questions. He studied his contemporaries and their self-delusions concerning the autocracy that held Czechoslovakia in its grip. Milosz’s insights into the thrall of Stalinism covered the melancholy political journey Czech intellectuals made from autonomy to servitude. Milosz’ study concluded that the transformation of the intelligenstia stemmed from a need for a “feeling of belonging.” He brilliantly dissected the state of mind of the fellow traveler, the deluded idealist, and the cynical time-server. His work was in the debunking tradition of Milovan Djilas’s study and confession of communist oppression (Djilas 1973), Arthur Koestler’s Darkness at Noon with its sad account of painful duplicities among party leaders and government officials, and Raymond Aron’s powerful indictment of the hypocritical intellectual classes in his Opium of the Intellectuals (1955).

The issues central to these informative works concern the true believer’s state of mind (and body)—that is to say, the person who has identified with History and who enthusiastically align themselves with political systems that deny them their freedom of expression. To think about cultist delusions as a form of psychointellectual captivity opens up a wide range of behaviors and social actions to analysis. Many forms of sclerotic political expression that are found in Fascism, Communism, and other totalizing ideologies are familiar territory to students of cultist sects affiliated with various types of fundamentalist Christianity or Islam. Indeed, there are myriad forms of psychic captivity. Economists committed to the master paradigmatic concept of the “market” when analyzing consumer behavior, and buyer/seller dynamics in commercial activities tend to be tied to beliefs in unelectable social laws that presumably govern these activities. As with physicists loyal to theories of gravity and thermodynamics may fail to appreciate the explanatory powers of alternative interpretative models that are not theoretically dependent on Newtonian and Quantum physics. In fact, the “market”—that sacred, conservative symbol and totem of Capitalism is an abstraction like “dialetical materialism.” The market is at one ultrarational trumping every other economic process; it is the acme of unreason—its reality is not open to question.

Celebrity Worship

During WWII in the Pacific campaign, John Wayne visited wounded marines in a hospital ward in Hawaii. Wayne, who never served but made several very popular films such as They Were Expendable, The Sands of Iwo Jima, was booed by wounded soldiers. Apparently, the shocks of combat made them realize that Wayne and others were in the business of staging illusions for mass consumption.

Celebrity worship is not limited to film stars or rock musicians; it is pervasive. Billy Graham is adulated worldwide. Today, others such as Pat Robertson and Joel Osteen enjoy stardom, fame, and celebrity power. These Christians celebrities travel in private jets, limousines, and are surrounded by bodyguards. They, like David letterman, Jay Leno, and others cultivate the same sort of intimacy with an audience and like other successful celebrities, they amass personal fortunes. The devotion around these people is similar to the frenzy surrounding political messiahs like President Obama, or the devotion of millions of fans for Oprah Winfrey. We seek to be like them because we yearn to see ourselves in those we worship.

Another celebrity fad TV production is American Idol—one of the most popular shows on American TV. The show travels to American cities in a nationwide search for contestants who may eventually get to Hollywood and obtain lucrative studio contacts. This is nothing new in American broadcasting. Decades ago on radio there was the Major Bowe’s Amateur Hour where people from every conceivable background performed before a national audience hoping to achieve stardom and success. The image-making power of modern media is evident in the brilliant visual spectacles of professional wrestling that was at one time a seedy pastime with a small audience. Today, it is a major media industry with huge national audiences.

The Seditious Joy of Professional Wrestling: Other Types of Stardom and Fame

Professional wrestling as distinct form of Greco-Roman wrestling was an Olympian sport and college athletic activity that operates, for its audiences, as the French semiologist Roland Barthes tells us, as a moral struggle (Barthes 1957).

Wrestling is a political phenomenon. The matches pit the symbolic representations of good versus evil. During the contest, the rules are violated when the cupidity that governs the spectacle demands it. Winning is everything; right and wrong do not actually matter; they are nothing more than expedient norms; (hence the huge hysterical crowds of low-brows, middle-brows and increasingly high brows) who are thrilled by the explicit displays of deceit, fraud, rule infractions, and gratuitous simulated violence. However, crowds that make a huge, growing audience for professional wrestling are not fooled by the antics of the wrestlers. The matches and the spectacle are understood as theater; but the hypertropic energy and power of fan emotion and hysteria that fill arenas where matches are presented seem tainted with cynicism and hilarity suggesting that the audience sees the events as staged. Fan outlets and releases are almost purely animal. If the world is rigged against you, if those in power stifle us (recall the frenzy on the film Network which featured a doomed, demented rebel who beseeched his audience in fiery tirades to cry out that they would not “take it anymore!”); if those in power outsource our jobs; foreclose on our homes—then, one must cheat back; do what must be done to survive. Duplicity is a part of life and not surprisingly, most popular wrestlers openly defy and taunt their employers but rarely upset the staged events; however, distasteful the manipulations and antics of the event may appear to the wrestlers themselves and their audiences.

More than 40 years ago, Daniel Boorstin wrote that in contemporary culture the fabricated and the theatrical have displaced the natural, the genuine, the spontaneous until social reality, society, and its cultural frameworks, appear to be something like elaborate stagecraft. The images are constructed by puppet masters—publicists, marketing and sales departments, TV and movie producers, advertisers, pollsters and a legion of manipulators of one kind or another who fill the TV screens, radio broadcasting, communication networks, and media spaces across the entire country (Boorstin 1961)

The media celebrity worship that emerges from the masters is not limited to the United States. Many examples may be cited: Eva Peron of Argentina, Kim Il Sung of North Korea, Nelson Mandela of South Africa, and Sukarno of Indonesia. The greatest celebrity of the modern era is probably the Emperor of Japan—more than John Paul II, or Hitler at the height of their respective fame or infamy.

Almost all of the most memorable celebrities have come from humble origins and their nondescript backgrounds are held as proof that even we, people from humble origins, can be adored and achieve worldwide fame. Celebrities like Oprah Winfrey, up from nowhere to billionaire TV queen and advisor of Presidents enjoys a kind of sainthood, which proves that nothing is impossible socially, psychologically or financially (Baudrillard 1970).

We understand the cult of celebrity as an expression of narcissism where superficial charm, self-importance, a need for constant stimulation, grandiosity; a penchant for deceitfulness, deception, and manipulation—all classic traits of psychopaths appear to be functional personality affects. Once fame and wealth are achieved, they become their own justifications, their own moral compass. How one gets to the top, or fills one’s pockets is largely irrelevant. Once you get there, those questions are no longer asked, as the sleek fox-like schemer Gordon Gecko in the film, Wall Street chides his audience during a meeting in which his snide, smug, and self-serving rhetoric topple the nervous executive leadership of a large finance corporation he is seeking to acquire. “Greed is good” he chortles to the delight of his greedy audience of stockbrokers and go-getters. Gordon Gecko is another celebrity-creature that Oliver Stone initially constructs as a player in one of the wildest films about the cutthroat financial circuses that typify a routine day at the Wall Street stock exchange.

The Debut of Celebrity Types

In recent years, the perverted ethics of “get what you can, anyway you can” gave us a parade of Wall Street bankers and investment brokers that damaged the nation’s economy and caused suffering for untold millions through egregious misuse of investor wealth and savings. Brokers and financial analysts stole from people who trusted them to generate the funds for a decent retirement and absconded with monies set aside for a grandchild’s education. The consequences have been financially catastrophic. Concerned with the psychological damage persons may experience because of exposure to Hollywood-type dream factories, the great critic, Walter Benjamin observed that “the cult of the movie star, fostered by the money of the film industry, preserves not the unique aura of the person but the “spell of the personality, the spell of a commodity” (Benjamin 2009).

Image making and its effects can emotionally distort individuals. According to C. W. Mills “The professional celebrity, male and female, is the crowning result of the star system that makes a fetish of competition.” In America, this sociopsychological process is carried out to the point where a man who can knock a small, white ball into a series of holes in the ground with more efficiency and skill than anyone else; thereby, gains access to the President of the United States. It is carried to:

The point where a chattering radio and television entertainer becomes the hunting chum of leading industrial executives, cabinet members, and the higher military. It does not seem to matter what the man is very best at; so long as he has won out in competition over all others, he is celebrated. Then a second feature of the star system begins to work: all the stars of any other sphere of endeavor or position are drawn towards the new star and he toward them. The successful, the champion, accordingly, is one who mingles freely with other champions to populate the world of the celebrity (Mills 1956, p. 74).

The Degraded Underside of Glamour and Celebrity

There is a universe of celebrity culture whose benchmarks may become the spectacle of humiliation and debasement that characterize some popular TV productions of which The Jerry Springer Show is one of the most widely seen. Watching the scenes of spousal abuse, sexual betrayal, and vile denunciation of each other, we recoil with “thank god that’s not me.” To watch this spectacle is probably an aspect of the same compulsion that drove ravenous crowds to the Roman Coliseum to witness a cavalcade of death; to the horrendous expectations of burning at the stake of religious heretics; to the excitement of the guillotine mechanically decapitating political villains, to the curious freak shows known as “The Ship of Fools,” which sailed the rivers and sea ports along Europe’s principal trading routes; and to savage racial lynchings in public squares of otherwise bucolic rural southern towns in decades past (Foucault 1965).

In the mass media David Letterman, Jay Leno, and a gaggle of lesser personalities sell us salvation, redemption, or revenge against our regimented existence. Our triumphs and sensational accomplishments happen on TV or occur in the movies, in reality TV, but rarely in real life. Celebrities now sell mortgages, life insurance, real estate, automobiles, and kitchen utensils; even Ronald Regan during a change in his show business career worked as a very successful salesman for the General Electric Corporation, presenting the familiar and comforting face of the corporate state. Regan would sweetly claim in a subdued voice that for GE, “progress is our most important product.” Regan became the President of the United States and his role in humanizing commercial products surely helped his image and subsequent political campaign.

Celebrities as Commodity Entrepreneurs

“Celebrity” is a status and a process that has transcended the role of actor/huckster. With TV and other media communications, celebrity as a prestigious status has been harnessed by corporate society to sell commodities which the public does not need. Most importantly, the political elites have exploited the machinery of celebrity—making in order to mold political figures into attractive candidates. A film with Robert Redford, The Candidate, illustrates this idea. In the film, as the son of a sitting governor, Redford plays the part of a maverick rebellious lawyer who allows himself to be exploited by political hustlers. Surprisingly, he wins election as a senator. The film ends with ominous dialogue that at first seems harmless and even endearing, but its ramifications are chilling. Upon wining, a baffled Redford exclaims to his Machiavellian master, “… what do I do next ?

Politicians are not the only ones peddled; other false fantasies and intimacies are “personalized” and manipulated with facile skill. Rajek calls celebrity culture “the cult of distraction that valorizes the superficial, the gaudy, the domination of commodity culture.” Further,

Capitalism originally sought to police play and pleasure, because any attempt to replace work as the central life interest threatened the economic survival of the system. The family, the state, and religion engendered a variety of patterns of moral regulation to control desire and ensure compliance with the system of production. However, as capitalism developed, consumer culture and leisure time expanded. The principles that operated to repress the individual in the workplace and the home were extended to the shopping mall and recreational activity. The entertainment industry and consumer culture produced what Marcuse called ‘repressive desublimation’. Through this process individuals unwittingly subscribed to the degraded version of humanity (Rajek 2001, pp. 33–34).

This cult of distraction, as Rajek points out, masks the real disintegration of culture. It conceals aspects of the meaninglessness and emptiness of our own lives. It seduces us into wasteful consumption, and deflates the salience of moral issues that would otherwise arise as social injustice increases, inequality grows, costly empirical wars expand, the threat of economic collapse becomes chronic, and political corruption remains unchecked. The pursuit of status and wealth continues briskly and slowly destroys our souls and our economy. Families live in sprawling mansions financed by mortgages they can no longer afford; shopping which used to be the compensation for spending 5 days a week laboring in tiny cubicles and was a favorite hobby next to TV, has collapsed. American workers increasingly lose jobs that are shipped overseas and outsourced by corporate companies that have disempowered them, used them, and have now discarded them. The films, The Matrix and the Matrix Reloaded presented stark, vivid images of massive destruction of our environment that are too vivid to serve as realistic portrayals of the veil of massive delusion enveloping society. But everyone gets the point of this sort of poetic license in film. It is over the top but a powerful indictment of how and what government deception might conceal and disguise.

In all of these obscene misrepresentations, celebrities manage to retain fame that seems free of responsibility; and their fame as C. Wright Mills observed, disguises those who possess true power: corporations and the oligarchic elites. Magical thinking about remedies for economic salvation, for sweeping medical care, for effective counter-terrorist policies, for truly effective drug control, for immigration problems, for crime in general, for prison problems, and so on, is the currency not only of celebrity culture but also of totalitarian culture. In Nazi Germany, the shrewd propaganda minister Gobbels, used film stars, opera singers, great athletes, writers, and other artists to speak positively about issues in industry, government, education, and many other topics of concern to the Nazi regime primarily because of their immensely influential affects on public opinion. And as we sink into an economic and political morass, we are still manipulated and distracted by the TV shadows flickering on the dark wall of Plato’s cave.

George Orwell feared those who would ban books. However, according to Neil Postman, Orwell misunderstood cultural trends. Things are likely to be even more disturbing:

What Huxley feared was that there would be no reason to ban books, for there would be no one who wanted to read one. Orwell feared those who would deprive us of information. Aldous Huxley feared those who would give us so much that we would be reduced to passivity and egoism. Orwell feared that the truth would be concealed from us. Huxley feared that the truth would be drowned in a sea of irrelevance. Orwell feared we would become a captive culture. Huxley feared we would become a trivial culture, preoccupied with some equivalent of the feelies, the orgy porgy, and the centrifugal bumble puppy. As Huxley remarked in Brave New World Reinvented the civil liberation and rationalists who are ever on the alert to oppose tyranny failed to take into account men’s almost infinite appetite for distractions. In 1984 by Orwell, Huxley added, people are controlled by inflicting pain. In Brave New World inflicting pleasure controls them. In short, Orwell feared that what we hate would ruin us. Huxley feared that what we love would ruin us (Postman 1985, p. 80).

The novelist, Philip Roth has noted that we live in an age in which the imagination of the novelist lies helpless before what will appear in the morning newspaper or TV news show: Roth says that, “the actuality is continually outdoing our talents, and the culture tosses up figures daily that are the envy of any novelist.” He further observed that the reality of celebrity culture “stupefies, it sickens, it infuriates, and finally it is even a kind of embarrassment to one’s own meager imagination” (Roth 2009).

Reality TV shows and their loony contestants exemplify Roth’s take on the tenuous grasp of the unreal quality of reality. Celebrity Wife Swap, a comparatively popular show, lacks any degree of self-consciousness. Show guests and contestants come naturally to exhibitionism, even if they become objects of audience ridicule. With a beguiling innocence, these characters open up their lives to millions of viewers, even when it involves messy relationships and the exposure of personal disasters. It appears that nothing is off-limits.

In a society that prizes entertainment above substance as long as something can be packaged and turned into drama, it will do (Rieber 2007). Intellectual or philosophical ideas require effort to absorb. Classical theater, books, and newspapers are pushed to the margins of cultural life, remnants of a bygone literate age. They are dismissed as inaccessible and elitist unless they are capable of providing effortless entertainment. The popularization of culture often ends in its degradation. Arendt claimed that:

The result of this is not disintegration but decay, and those who promote it are not the Tin Pan Alley composers but a special kind of intellectual, often well read and well informed, whose sole function is to organize, disseminate, and change cultural objects in order to persuade the masses that Hamlet can be as entertaining as My Fair Lady, and perhaps as educational as well. There are many great authors of the past who have survived centuries of oblivion and neglect, but it is still an open question whether they will be able to survive an entertaining version of what they have to say (Arendt 1993, p. 2007).

American Idol, Television, and Literacy at Risk

Once upon a time, humorless grade school teachers operated their classrooms like rooming house detectives: syntax and grammar, the skeletal structure of language, were learned or acquired in Maoist-like sessions of drill and chant under their piercing, ferocious gaze. Somehow, despite everything, it worked. Pupils who completed grade school could, for the most part, read and write acceptably (ABC news 2008).

Have we traded the printed word for the gleaming image? The answer is yes for many reasons: technology for one, has created a computer world with its mix of text and image. Public rhetoric is designed to be comprehensible to a 10-year-old child or an adult with a sixth grade reading level which ensures a larger audience of individuals who can grasp what is communicated. Most of us speak, think, and are entertained at this level. For critics, like Allan Bloom, America has been qietly transformed into a replica of Pinocchio’s Pleasure Island with its promise of no school and endless fun (Bloom 1987).

Functional illiteracy is epidemic in North America. Nearly, a third of the nation’s population is illiterate or barely literate—a figure growing by 2 million a year as the country continues to fill up with illegal aliens. Television which is a medium built around the clever manipulation of images along with computer technologies has become our primary focus of mass communication.

TV speaks in the language of familiar, comforting clichés, and sometimes exciting images. Its format from popular reality shows to sit-coms is fairly predictable. TV offers a mass, virtual experience that shapes the ways many people speak and interact with one another. It also creates a false sense of intimacy with elites, who are our actors, news people, politicians, business tycoons (like Donald Trump), and sport stars. They are all validated and enhanced by the media. It is now the case that in the popular sense, if a person is not seen on TV then on some level he or she is not important. TV and media in general confer authority, prestige, and power.

Pundits, corporate advertisers, talk-show hosts, and gossip-fueled entertainment networks bombard viewers with cant and spectacle filling the airwaves or computer screens with information that is generated daily if not hourly. It would seem that not since the Nazi and Soviet dictatorships and perhaps the brutal authoritarian control of the Catholic Church in Medieval Europe, has the content of information been as skillfully controlled and manipulated. In this environment, propaganda begins to emerge as a substitute for ideas and ideology. Knowledge may be easily confused with manipulated emotion. Commercial products are brilliantly advertised such that a “selection” of one product–for example, one after-shave lotion, may be construed as an expression of individuality. Needless to say, being denuded of the intellectual and linguistic tools that would enable us to discern and separate truth from illusion, we may become cognitively impoverished. In an atmosphere of declining literacy, a fertile ground has been seeded for a new authoritarian or totalitarianism.

Junk Politics: Attractive Packaging and Political Theater

Celebrity culture has bequeathed to us what Demott calls “junk politics” (Demott 2003, p. 36). This type of political polemic does not engage in conventional demands nor does it pose ideas about right, justice, taxes, or foreign policy. Rather, it personalizes and moralizes issues instead of clarifying them. Its temperament is well suited to the culture of celebrity: it is impatient with articulated conflict and enthusiastic about America’s optimism and moral character. Yet, nothing changes. For instance, we have to overhaul the health care system. Sales pitch rhetoric comes from some leading political figures and government officials about a 20,000 page piece of legislation that few have, or can read. Junk politics pre-empts analytical approaches to ideas by redefining traditional values where political courage is transformed into braggadocio. Junk politics reverses things: external threats are magnified and domestic problems are treated as if the were minor issues.

Within this framework, one’s record does not matter and only what the local cable news shows say is reality prevails. Examining official records or comparing verbal claims of officials with written or published facts does not seem to matter. One lives in an eternal present. Do people really understand the predatory loan deals that plague working people, that drives them into foreclosure and bankruptcy? Can they decipher the fine point in credit card agreements that too often plunges them into unmanageable debt? Can they reasonably be expected to cut through the deception and complexities couched in impenetrable legal language in which documents are written? The public at large is hostage to the slogans, clichés, and advertising jingles that manipulate and exploit them. One might conclude from this mayhem loosed on the public that life is like a state of amnesia where we are constantly seeking new forms of escapism or instant gratification.

Boorstin sees these games as self-defeating, and socially pernicious: “Nearly everything we do to enlarge our world, to make life more interesting… in the long run has the opposite effect… we transform elusive dreams into graspable images within which each of us can fit. By doing so we mark the boundaries of our world with a wall of mirrors” (Boorstin 1961, op.cit: 61).

The Most Essential Skill in Political Theater

If consumer culture is not much more than an artifice, then political leaders no longer need to be competent, sincere, or honest. They need to seem only to have these qualities; mostly, they need a story, a narrative—the reality and validity of which is irrelevant. It can be at odds with facts; what matters is the consistency and emotional approval of the story. Those who have mastered the art of entertainment are more likely to succeed in this exercise than the efforts of genuinely sincere public figures.

An image-based culture communicates values and ideas through narrative pictures and pseudo-drama. Celebrity sex scandals, drug use, and train wrecks; child abductions, hurricanes—these events play well on T.V. and computer screens. International diplomacy, labor union negotiations, and the discussion of convulsive financial crises by economic and business experts in impenetrable technical language do not yield exciting narratives to compare with images of 9/11 or the Madrid train terror attack. On the contrary, a rich governor of a powerful state patronizing call girls becomes a huge a story, whereas a politician who proposes financial regularity reform or advocates curbing wasteful spending is simply boring. As in the past when monarchies used court conspiracies to divert and mislead their subjects away from urgent questions, today salacious films and vicious political gossip, journalistic and media celebrity circuses such as Princess Diana’s death in a paparazzi-inspired fatal auto accident distract us with their personal scandals and mishaps. They create our public mythology; film, stage, sports, and politics are the context similar to coliseum events that engage our attention with their convincing fantasies. The sheer power of this fabricated montage of petty film star jealousies and their ludicrous concerns is heightened when contrasted with the real world of al-Qaeda terrorism, the oil crisis, the collapse of Wall Street and financial markets across a world of teeming billions living side by side in impossible squalor. This contradiction scarcely impinges on a public consciousness warped by the illusion packaging of Academy Award fever. In such a framework, the mendacity affecting belief would seem not to matter when the system itself, including its political and social filters that process information, is psychologically sick. Will it suffice to expose the callousness and cruelty of the powerful corporate state? That in itself is an act of faith.

Postscript: The Moral Geography of a Place

“Hollywood” is a difficult concept to come to grips with. It is elusive and elastic at the same time. There is disagreement about its real estate boundaries, identifications, and location. Movie stars, of course, have never lived in the Hollywood tenement district, and by 1930 most of the big studios had relocated to the suburbs whose buildings are surrounded with gently purring high-voltage security fencing. According to Carey McWilliams, the actual golden age of Hollywood was “lonely, insecure, full of marginal personalities, people just barely able to make ends meet; a place of opportunists and confidence men, petty chiselers and racketeers, bookies and race track touts; of people desperately on the make (McWilliams 1946)”.

The Hollywood in the imagination of the world’s movie public was kept anchored to its namesake location by the inspired calendar of vital events like the annual Academy Awards authorized by the awesome-sounding Motion Picture Academy of Arts and Sciences, by star-studded premiers of films, by footprint and handprint ceremonies outside famous restaurants and hotels, and by the magical investment of locals such as Grumman’s Chinese and Egyptian Theaters, at the corners of Hollywood and Vine. These latter were tourist shrines-a celluloid Fatima or Lourdes part of the bus tour and its chief activities. But over the past generations, the real Hollywood has declined from picturesque dilapidation to hyper violent slum; even the rituals have more or less ceased and the façade has crumbled.

Rehab projects, another bland term for sociological hygiene programs in the region, unfortunately have not succeeded. Hollywood is, or was in harm’s way, put there by land developers, builders, and politicians over the decades. Interestingly, while occupying a central role in America’s fantasy life-Hollywood, Los Angeles has been destroyed over and over again in movies and films since the beginning of the twentieth century.

As Hollywood’s immiseration eroded the historic links between movie-making entertainments for an adoring public of consumers, it gradually became possible to imagine the resurrection of Hollywood in a more affluent, more secure neighborhood. Thus, in Orlando Florida, Disney created a dazzling mirage of MGM’s golden age. Later, another mammoth entertainment corporate conglomerate, MCA, produced its own idolized version of Hollywood Boulevard and Rodeo Drive at Universal Studios, Florida (Davis 1999).

The elopement of Disney and Hollywood to the politically hospitable environs of Florida, further depressed real estate values in real-time Hollywood. Plans for its rehabilitation today have been shipwrecked. One sees the “Hollywood” sign in the hills and old film tape of what it once was. It produces the kind of nostalgia that stirs people who see the pictures of the flag-raising on Iwo Jima, or the calamitous crashing to the ground of the Twin Towers on 9/11.

Hollywood/Los Angeles may have a resiliency, however, even if its fantasy. In the film Independence Day (1996), designed to serve as a model of movie land’s sense of patriotism, aliens devastate the USA. In New York it is a tragedy, and then in Los Angeles it becomes predictably, a farce. In the film, New York’s Fifth Avenue (Manhattan) is a boiling tsunami of fire and brimstone pouring down the famous avenue. The depiction is horrifying. When the aliens turn to Los Angeles, however, who could identify with the caricatured mob of hippies, new age freaks, and gay men dancing in idiotic ecstasy on a skyscraper roof eager to greet the extraterrestrials? There is a comic undertone of “good riddance” when kooks like these are vaporized by the Earth’s latest ill-mannered quests.